The organist laid the tarnished brass key in the folded hands of my father, and for a moment she kept her own hand over his, as if to warm them. The red ribbon trailed over the edge of the casket, bright against the white satin. She was an elderly woman, past eighty, small and straight in a lavender suit with a pearl brooch, and she had walked the whole length of the chapel without a cane. “My name is Louise Armand,” she said, turning to face us. “I have played the organ at First Baptist Church of Monroe for fifty one years. This is the key to the organ loft. Your father gave it to me.”
“The church board never knew,” said Louise. “The loft was locked every night at nine, by order of the trustees, and the organ was not to be touched outside of service. But I was a widow with a small room and no piano. Your father unlocked the loft for me late at night, three and four nights a week, for eleven years. He stayed in the building until I was done, mopping the narthex slowly, pretending to be busy, so I would not be alone in that big dark church. When I played, he stood in the doorway with his mop, and I knew from the way the mop had stopped that he was listening.”
She smiled faintly. “One night I asked him what he liked best. He said, Miss Louise, I like the slow one, the one that sounds like going home. I played it for him a hundred times.” She lifted the end of the ribbon. “Three years ago he gave me this. He said, It is yours now. The trustees can cut a new one. I said, I cannot take your key. And he said, Louise, it was never mine. I only held it for the music.” She pressed her lips together. “He was a janitor. He was the finest steward that church ever had.”
A tarnished brass key on a red ribbon was laid in the hands of a janitor by an old organist and gave one son the morning to bring his brother back to the loft.
I sat with my hands in my lap and did not trust myself to move. Beside me, my brother Marcus, the one who had planned the service, a heavy man in a gray suit and a gold watch, a deacon of the same church for twelve years, was staring at the key. He had told me on the telephone that thirty minutes was plenty. He had said, He was the janitor, Dwayne, let us not make a spectacle. I had agreed, out of tiredness and shame. Now Marcus lowered his eyes, and I saw a muscle jump in his jaw. He knew the loft. He had walked past our father a thousand times.
The pastor stood in the second row. “I did not know about the key,” he said, in a thick voice. “But I know that in nineteen years the furnace never failed on a Sunday, the pews were never dusty, and there was always coffee in the pot at six. I thought it was the Lord. I see now the Lord had help.” There was soft, wet laughter. “He also kept the basement open on cold nights. I found out in January. I asked him why. He said, Pastor, nobody should sleep in a car in December. And he asked me not to tell.”
Louise raised her hands. “May I play for him?” she asked the room, and then, gently, to my brother, “Marcus, I would like your permission.” Marcus looked as if he had been struck. He nodded. The pastor and the funeral director and four ushers wheeled an old electric organ, borrowed from the church, into the chapel, and she sat, and her small hands came down, and the slow song began, the one that sounds like going home. I closed my eyes. I could hear my father, with his bucket and mop, moving through the quiet halls of my childhood.
When the last chord faded, my brother stood. He walked to the front, unbuttoning his jacket as if it were too tight. “I was ashamed of him,” he said, in a rough voice, to the whole chapel. “I wore a suit to church every Sunday and stood in the vestibule, and he was in the corner in his gray coveralls with a bucket, and I looked away.” He gripped the edge of the casket. “Daddy, I thought you were small. You were the biggest man in the building. I am sorry. I am sorry I made them cut it short.” He turned. “There will be no cutting short today.”
So the service went on. Ninety minutes, two hours. People stood up who had never spoken in public. A woman said he had fixed her porch steps. A boy of sixteen said he was the one who slept in the basement in January, when his mother lost her apartment, and that the janitor brought him a plate of food every night and never asked for a thing. A retired trucker said he had driven forty miles to be there. Louise sat at the old organ through it all and played softly beneath each voice, as one lays a quilt under a sleeper.
The trustees met on Thursday. Marcus, as a deacon, made a motion. By unanimous vote, the church renamed the fellowship hall the Open Door Hall, in memory of my father, and created a fund to house anyone in need, to be run out of the basement he had quietly kept warm. The key was not buried with him. Louise took it back from his hands at the cemetery, after the last prayer, and gave it to Marcus. She said, A key is for unlocking. Marcus nodded and put it on the ring with the keys to his own house.
On Sunday morning, a little before dawn, I drove to the church alone and used the key that Marcus had lent me to open the side door. I do not know why. The sanctuary was dark and smelled of lemon polish. At the top of the loft stairs there was a worn spot on the third step where a mop bucket had rested for twenty nine years. I sat on it. Below me, Louise was already at the bench, playing the slow song, and she did not look around. She only nodded, as if she had been expecting me, and the music went on.
